museum

Even if you're not hopping on a plane anytime soon, it's still possible to take a peek at fantastic museum exhibits in distant countries remotely online. Today, I have some photos to share with you from Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum. The museum's new exhibition showcases the breadth of the museum’s collections, which include over 90,000 works of painting, sculpture, photography, film, video, works on paper, artist's books, applied arts, and industrial and graphic design.

The museum has also dedicated one room to the design of metal furniture, both modern classics and contemporary pieces by, among others, Ron Arad, Xavier Lust, and Gerrit Rietveld. The aluminum armchair seen here, from Rietveld, is from the museum's permanent collection. Even though it was built in the early 1940s, it looks absolutely contemporary. (By the way, does this chair remind you of Restoration Hardware's WWII-inspired aviation furniture, such as the Spitfire Chair?)

Museum photo by Gert Jan van Rooij, chair photo by Erik and Petra Hesmer

Want to see Natalie Portman and Michelle Williams kick, shake, and trip one another over a bottle of perfume? Then the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art has just the "commercial" for you. Right now on their blog Curve, the LA MOCA is showing artist Francesco Vezzoli's minute-long spot for fictional perfume Greed.

The short film takes license with many of the conventions of beauty advertising and makes light of the way we're sold products. It's a funny piece, and especially interesting now that Natalie is starring in the new Miss Dior Chérie fragrance commercial, which actually does have many of the genre's trappings. To see Michelle and Natalie go perfumaniacal, check out the video below.

A new exhibit is set to debut at the Smithsonian next month, and it needs your input! The Art of Video Games exhibit will chronicle the 40-year evolution of video games as art. And in order to create the most representative list of video games loved by Americans, the Smithsonian is asking people to vote for their favorites.

Video game fans can vote online for up to 80 titles out of 240 choices divided by era, game type, and platform.

The voting ends April 7, and once completed, the exhibit will feature the winning game from each genre and platform. These games will be supplemented with videos, playable games, and additional features. Anyone can vote, but you must register with the site to do so. Voters are encouraged to not simply vote for their favorites but to choose games that "are visually spectacular or boast innovative design."

Over the past few years, Google Maps and Street View have made huge progress in bringing us to faraway places we might not otherwise get to visit. Now, its new Art Project provides street view-style access to 1,000 pieces of art in 17 different museums around the world. Art is displayed via high resolution photos through Picasa. So hi-res, in fact, that Google refers to the technology as "gigapixel photo-capturing technology."

Such advanced imaging technology means that you can zoom into the art to get an incredibly close look at its detail, and an informational panel describes the specific piece you're viewing. You can even build your own virtual "collection" by adding notes for future reference. And in addition to works of art, the new project gives you the ability to virtually tour museums from New York's MoMA to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

Paris's Musée d'Orsay, renowned for its collection of Impressionist paintings, is about to become home to a rather different kind of legendary work. From January 6 through 28, the side of the museum will be covered with an enormous Chanel No.5 bottle made entirely from 1,200 hand-assembled sequins. The ad itself is going to be absolutely massive as well, covering 2,890 square feet of the museum, and will be visible from the Seine. It's a rather decadent way of advertising, but would you expect anything less from Karl Lagerfeld?

If you know the way to San Jose (or just happen to live nearby) there's a really fun workshop running at the city's Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum and Planetarium on the second Sunday of every month. Egyptian Oils and Perfumes allows olfaction addicts of all ages to learn about the oils and perfumes popular in Ancient Egyptian times. Whether you're interested in what kind of oils the priests of Ra used in their rituals or what kind of fragrance Nefertiti might have worn, there's plenty of cool stuff to learn, and it sounds like a pretty interesting group activity if you've got a posse of friends or family in town.

Set your sights on a day of discovery. If your children were mesmerized by the dinosaurs, spaceships, sculptures, and animals in Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian, you don't have to venture to Washington DC to re-create the experience. Smithsonian magazine is working with more than 1,000 museums nationwide to offer admission to anyone presenting a free downloadable pass on Museum Day, Sept. 26. While most museums charge hefty admissions to view their their latest exhibits, the Smithsonian's 19 museums remain free throughout the year, and the Museum Day program hopes to mimic that experience around the country.

Photo courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox